Would You Rather I Be Dead? by Chelsea Sutton

Every night before bed, Dad dragged us around the house to do final checks of the recorders and the night-vision cameras. Make sure batteries are at full, make sure they have optimal positioning, make sure plugs are firmly in the wall so that nothing can fall out or off or cockeyed because of some vibrations from a passing truck. There must be hours of footage, us waving our arms in the dark of the living room to check focus and angle and night-vision efficacy, our skin green and glowing on the monitor, our voices lamenting, this is so stupid, ghosts aren’t real.       

We stayed in our rooms at night, bathrooms or sneaking snacks be damned, though Chrissy once had the stomach flu and was up and down all night. Dad spent the morning yelling about the ruined footage, how he couldn’t tell her vomiting sounds from the groans of phantoms and when I laughed at that he sent me to my room and made me review footage from the week before—Boo Duty we called it privately—every second of tape please, take notes on every creak of the floorboards, every street noise, every dust particle that wriggled across the screen.

At night, I’d sneak over to a recorder when Dad was asleep, and whisper into it: I like peas. Oooo I’m a ghooost! The color of the bathroom walls is just atrocious. Am I dead? I’d ask. Would you rather I be dead? I hate you, I said once. And then that was all I said. I hate you. I hate you. Dad never mentioned the whispers, but Boo Duty came around more often as I got older.

We grew up, we moved out, we went to college, we lived in many non-haunted houses, we got married, we fixed creaking floorboards with lubricants and powders rather than rituals and spy gear. Dad gifted us with night-vision cameras and audio recorders, which we packed away in the closet unopened.

After his retirement, Dad only slept during the day, staying up through the night to ask questions of the ghosts. He’d investigate our houses when staying for the holidays and we’d ask him to stop, that we didn’t want to know. It was our right not to know if our houses were haunted. I’d still find a recorder secretly placed in the bowl of fruit in my kitchen or by the keys in the entryway of Chrissy’s house. On those visits, I’d whisper into the hidden recorder when I woke up in the night, anxious and buzzing with thoughts, avoiding the creakiest parts of the house I could never get to quiet down. I’d whisper things about my life, worries at work, feelings of inadequacy, moments of failure and triumph. I think my marriage might be ending, I whispered one Christmas after a long day of keeping up appearances.

I stayed with him after the divorce, and the cameras and recorders were going all day because, ghosts don’t care what time it is. It was a Saturday afternoon during that period when he screamed for me to come to his office and showed me a video from two nights prior. In the green-tinted night-vision footage, a glass of water seemed to move two inches across the dining room table on its own. You see, he said, we did it. THAT is a ghost moving the water glass! We have proof! We did it.

When he died, I put the house up for sale. It sold quickly to a young couple, a strange image of my old life, a shadow of a failure. I took all the cameras down except for one. The night before I moved out, I turned it on one more time, angling toward a water glass on the dining table, and I whispered into the microphone. This is your last chance. Show me what you got.

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CHELSEA SUTTON — Chelsea is a writer and theatre maker of what she likes to call gothic whimsy. She’s a PEN America Emerging Voices Fellow, a Humanitas PlayLA award-winner, a graduate of the 2022 Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Workshop, and holds an MFA in Creative Writing from UC Riverside. Her short fiction has appeared in Uncanny Magazine, Apex Magazine, CRAFT Literary, Bourbon Penn, and Flash Fiction Online, among others. Her first flash fiction chapbook Only Animals is now available through Wrong Publishing. Chelseasutton.com.

Art by DAEGAN LUNSFORD — Daegan is a multidisciplinary artist living in Canada. He currently works in gouache and egg tempera, as well as many other unconventional mediums. His artwork focuses on delight, nostalgia and Americana